With the expanding capacity of the built-in memories of terminal devices such as mobile phone and Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), etc and the increasingly advanced functions of operation devices, there are more and more applications that can be developed and installed in the terminal devices, and the functions of the terminal devices are becoming richer and richer.
There are two kinds of programs running in the terminal devices: one is referred to as essential programs which are used for initiating to maintain the normal operations and the basic functions of the terminal devices, and the essential programs cannot be randomly closed or suspended; and the other is referred to as function programs for realizing some specific application functions, which can be initiated with the initiation of such specific application functions and closed with the closing of such specific application functions, and contain the programs such as photographing, Short Message Service(SMS) and players, etc. Among the function programs, a part of them may be completely closed and then may not occupy the memory after their functions have been closed, while the rest of them may run in the background and still occupy the memory after their functions have been closed. For example, a function that is widely used in mobile phones is to make the call that was made the last time by pressing the dial key twice consecutively, whose essence is that pressing the dial key the first time is to open the “outgoing calls” in the “call history” and further pressing the dial key the second time is to make the call that was made the last time. Then the mobile phones may be switched to a calling interface, and may return to the standby interface after the call is over. After the call is over, users may watch a situation that the call has been over and the mobile phones are in standby mode, with no programs running. However, the program corresponding to the “call history” may have turned to run in the background, and has not been closed completely with still occupying the memory.
If more such similar function programs are running, more memory will be occupied, then there will be less space for running other programs, the power consumption will be higher, and a user may experience a slow response speed of his mobile phone, a long period of initiating a new program and a short standby period of his battery, which resulting in a poor user experience.
Running a program will occupy the memory space of a device. Obviously, more memory will be occupied if more applications are running in a terminal device. However, the memory space in a device is limited, and cannot be expanded to no end with the increasing number of the applications.